


turns out we don't all fight like dogs in the end

by Cerberuss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s02e09 Croatoan, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:41:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22332823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerberuss/pseuds/Cerberuss
Summary: Not today, not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow or next week but eventually, they would be the death of each other. Fate sealed the moment Sam clasped all of his  fingers around Dean’s giant thumb, when Dean felt his breath leave his body, filled instead with such an unhealthy amount of love. Dean knew they were special. His baby brother, who looked back at him with the same colour eyes, and bled the same Winchester red.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 92





	turns out we don't all fight like dogs in the end

**Author's Note:**

> I started working on this immediately after finishing s2 ep 9 which was... over three months ago. It sort of became the thing I prodded away at when my heart hurt too much to focus on anything else. I guess I'll need a new outlet fic now because I don't see myself falling away from the brothers anytime soon.
> 
> Title is from Ben Howard's [The Defeat.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sj_rrITRc8)

Roanoke 2.0 put a bad taste in his mouth the minute they drove over the bridge. That watery kind of saliva that coats your mouth before you’re about to empty your guts. _Welcome to Rivergrove, population 324 - where we know all your secrets._

Maybe it is the proximity to Salem, only half an hour down the highway. An area they tend to avoid, prod every now and then with a stick twice an arms length for posterity's sake. Speed past the exit at double the limit, don’t glance at the lights in the distance.

But Sam had ground his forehead into the side of the brown scratchy duvet at the hotel in Colorado, sprawled on the floor between their beds trying to catch his breath as he willed his skull to cease splitting, and then somehow they had crossed three states into Oregon before the sun had retired the following day.

Because who was Dean to deny Sam when he looked up at him like that from patchy, vomit-stained carpet. Through his nightmare-sweated bangs, eyes wide with the fear of what he had been shown.

The uncapped, rag soaked bottles of chemicals filled the clinic with a toxic smell, the burn of it seared all the way up his nostrils, pinched that spot behind his eyes, left a betadine tang at the back of his throat. The door he’d locked kept the air stagnant and Dean sat on the desk and looked down at Sam, his eyes red; always red these days.

He should never have caved, should never have crawled the two thousand miles to California, should have turned the car around and booked it back to Kansas the minute his consciousness caught up with his lead foot heavy on the pedal. Should have left Sam at Stanford where he could live some kind of life, sitting with his head hung over the American fucking Constitution instead of hung and upset over Dean refusing to lodge a bullet in his brain.

In that skull burning chemical, we’re-about-to-die-and-this-is-it intoxicated state Dean had let honesty slip - _tired of this, Sammy_ \- and came to the uncomfortably comfortable conclusion that dying under Sam’s hand would be the only appropriate way for him to go. A round-about revenge for everything Dean’s put him through. Except he’s so sickeningly aware of how much the idea of laying a finger on Dean scares Sam, as if the tears that soaked his brother’s face hadn’t given that away.

As if there were any other way this reality could play out. Refusing to leave Sam to succumb to whatever cruel strand of rabies was stuck to the inside of his veins.

John’s words had gripped him too, like they so often did. Another weight to shoulder for the good of them both. Dean sat there, violently aware of the cool metal of his gun sitting restless next to his hip, just about feeling his father’s sure words against the side of his face. Look after Sammy; as if Dean didn’t know how to do that the best, the words that he’d been reciting since John had asked him to carry Sam out of their burning house. As if John had forgotten all the times he left Sam in his care. _Look after Sammy, Dean, look after Sammy_ ; the flash of the Impala’s headlights blinding them as their father pulled out of the driveway for weeks at a time.

_Kill him, if it comes to that._

Dean did his best to repress the last half, but it had stuck under his tongue like peanut butter and Dean was reminded of it at the least opportune times. _Look after Sammy, even if that means killing him_. Put him down like a dog that’s sunk its teeth into someone while trying to defend itself. John’s words twisting into something he’d tell Dean before a hunt. _If he turns, you paint his brains against the floor, you hear me, son?_

Is that what he would have done? If John was here with them now, would he have pointed the silver metal between his own son’s eyes and redecorated the disinfected white of the clinic red with his youngest son’s blood? Would he have hesitated at all?

Dean had torn his eyes from Sam’s when he heard the clinic door click back open, standing from his counter lean, feeling very wrong suddenly, tongue too big to sit right behind his teeth. He could feel Sam’s stare at the side of his face as he pieced together the rest of Dean’s sentence from the way he had looked at him. _No, never about Dad. You, it’s always been you_ , and there was a quiet, shaky inhale from the centre of the room.

_Rivergrove, population 0 - where we know nothing and you shouldn’t ask._

Dean drives them out of Oregon, doesn’t stop until the chemical residue at the back of his throat turns sour with lack of sleep. Glancing in the rearview mirror every hundred miles, almost certain he can still see the Rivergrove slip-road, Dean pushes them as far away as he can, until the knot in his gut lets up and the stiffness in the air between them shifts in a way that has nothing to do with the window Dean had open a slit.

They aren’t talking about it. Sam jostles restless in his seat, looking at Dean for a beat too long - like he wants to broach the topic, but closes his mouth after seeing Dean tense, hands white knuckled around the wheel.

They haven’t stopped moving since he found Sam clutching at his head on the floor of the hotel two days ago and Dean’s eyes crust at the corners and droop as heavy as his body feels in the leather seat. Sam has fallen asleep once they crossed into Idaho, resigning himself to ball up against the window, tinted sporadically orange under the highway lights.

Dean is grateful Sam hasn’t bothered to ask him to stop, that Sam knows him well enough to understand that the rumble of the black forever-strip under the wheels and hundreds of miles of distance is what Dean needed to collect himself again.

Eventually, when it becomes too cold to keep the window cranked - when Dean finally starts feeling it bite his skin again - and after Sam has wrapped his spider arms around his own chest and whimpered gently in his sleep - Dean turns the Impala into the next motel they pass.

A long L shaped building of brick, the dilapidated sign out the front - lit underneath by an off-beat flickering - boasts twenty-three christian television channels. They pull into and cut through the low settling fog of the car park, Sam doesn’t wake as Dean opens the squeaky driver’s side door; hair still matted against the glass of the window as he returns with a set of room keys for the night.

Dean leans over the wheel and taps his brother’s chest, thinking back on when their father would pull a sleeping Sam out of the backseat as a kid. Dean, loosely jealous that he wasn’t strong enough to bundle Sam up himself, had told Sam it had been him that carried him to bed when he’d ask the following morning. Didn’t have to lie when John decided Sam was too old for that kind of treatment, held his brother’s hand and guided his sleep-heavy feet up steps while Sam hid his eyes from the obtrusive lights. John had let the flywire door slam between them, the noise like a gunshot, jolting Sam awake proper. _Sorry Sammy, almost there._

Dean feels Sam rise under his hand, his body tensing and immediately relaxing when realising who has touched him, his eyes heavy and half closed as he looks up at Dean, the yellow of the motel light softening him around the edges, hair tangled and tousled in his face. Sam curls his fingers around Dean’s wrist and keeps him from slinking away. Pulls Dean down and kisses him on the mouth.

Sam tastes as stale as Dean feels. Tired and foggy and three quarters brain-dead, kisses him slow and sleepy. Sam’s heartbeat is strong where Dean still has a hand over his chest, the warmth of Sam seeping under his skin, down his spine, curling into his gut when Sam wakes up enough to let out a quiet noise, fanning warm breath over Dean’s face.

In the years that Sam grew too old to be carried out of the car - when he started refusing Dean’s help, and after the flywire cracked closed behind their father - Sam would put his mouth on Dean’s neck. Push his mud-clotted, gangly body up against Dean’s - taller than him, already - and keep Dean there against the backdoor of the Impala. Licking under Dean’s jaw, checking they were okay after a hunt John insisted they join, Dean’s pulse still ricocheting from the adrenaline of the kill, fast and alive under his brother’s mouth.

That’s all this is; Sam reaching out to check they were okay in a way that has never worked with words. Dean can’t lie like this, with Sam’s hand on his neck, fingers pressing into the base of his skull. He’s never been able to, his brother’s hands on him like truth serum, sodium pentothal. The same stuff they used for anesthetic, dulled the brain and loosens the tongue, seeps down Dean’s spine where Sam has his fingers pressed, makes Dean want to admit to things he hadn’t even known he was guilty of. _Dad told me I’d have to kill you._

“C’mon,” Dean says, smoothing out his brother’s shirt, tapping his chest twice. “I want to use up this whole establishment’s hot water.”

Sam huffs, still kicking sleep from behind his eyes, untangling his slow limbs from where they’re comfortably tucked around Dean. Sam opens his door still slouched and yawns out a halfhearted _don’t_. Leans against the wall while Dean jimmies the key in the lock of their room, the metal bent out of shape. Sam’s hair catches on the brick, stuck up at the back of his head, the fabric of his jumper scratching as he sags impatiently, his breath white in the late night chill.

Dean is very aware of him - always, but more so as he trails into the cold, twin single. Watching as Sam collapses onto the bed furthest away from the door out of habit, an old unspoken rule, put Dean between Sam and the entrance, let them get through him first.

“At least take your shoes off dude.” Dean kicks at his feet on his way to the shower, hung off the end of the bed because Sam has landed halfway and buried his face in the comforter, mumbles _fuck off_ into the feathers.

The room smells like dust. Brown wallpaper bubbled and lifted in places, ceiling stained with water so bad it looks like a page from a magic eye book. Two wooden crosses hang on the wall above the beds, the one over Sam’s crooked left, just a little.

Sam still has his face pressed into the pillow when Dean leaves the bathroom after a long while of staring at the black mold built up in the dips between the tiles, letting the water run cold over his shoulders, until the temperature shook him alive again.

He watches Sam as he’s toweling off his hair, the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the smallest sliver of exposed skin at his hip, the broad expanse of his back, arms tucked under pillow; wonders when exactly it was that he grew so well into himself.

Stanford, his brain provides. When Dean wasn’t around to see, wasn’t there to hold him back anymore. Around strangers that hadn’t had the opportunity to see him as a teenager, all bones and baggy clothes and angry, tired eyes. People other than his brother there to feed him opinions and the how-to’s of life, fill him out and up and into something Dean isn’t sure he recognises one-hundred percent anymore because Sam’s eyes are only ever red-rimmed and sad these days and being back in the hunt has everything to do with it. Dean’s fault.

He sits on the opposite bed, facing away from Sam because his brother is like the sun; dangerous to look at for too long. Dean scrubs his hands over his face and doesn’t think about what Sam had begged him to do in the examination room. Thinks about anything else.

“Dean?” Sam says - half slurs, in that way he’s done since he first learnt how to get his tongue around his brother’s name, before mom, before dad. The first sign of their shared curse.

“Here, Sam,” Dean replies, always replies. He hears Sam shifting, the rustle of the blanket as he lifts himself to sit, probably. “Shower’s free.”

“Hot water?”

Dean hums, turns and smiles at his brother in that shit-eating way he knows makes Sam’s hackles rise. “Nope.”

Sam groans and collapses his elbows, falls face first into his pillow and Dean has to look away again because the force of it has ridden his shirt up further and Dean can see the bruises he put there with his mouth.

“What? S’not like I didn’t warn you, dude. Coulda beat me to it if you weren’t lying there with your boots still on.”

“‘m tired,” Sam replies, pathetically. Dean’s chest tightens regardless.

“I don’t care if you sleep like that but don’t bitch at me tomorrow when you’re cranky,” he says, standing to walk over and flip the light off.

Dean gets under the musty covers, the sheets cold and rough. It smells the same as every motel room they’ve stayed in since their mother burnt up on the ceiling and Dean’s upset that this is what is familiar to him now. The colour of the light casting shadows from the alarm clock the only difference. That and the shape of the stains on the roof. They’re bathed in red tonight and Sam has turned to look at him from his twin bed. Dean can feel it against the side of his face.

“What, Sam?”

There’s no response and Dean thinks that this is familiar too, the sound of his brother breathing and his own heartbeat in his ears.

“Today--” Sam starts after a while and Dean instinctively tightens his fist where it’s bunched up around his shirt. He’s expected this, knew Sam wasn’t going to let it go. Knows his brother has been playing through what he’d said in that locked room on repeat in the same way Dean has been trying not to.

“No.” Dean turns to put his back to him again, closing his eyes and willing him to give it up, because if he can’t see Sam and his huge puppy-dog eyes he’s less likely to say stupid shit. “Not doing this.”

“ _Dean_.”

“Go the fuck to sleep.”

Sam huffs loudly and Dean tries not to hyperfocus on the sound of Sam taking his shoes off but the thunk of them hitting the carpet is loud because there’s no one else in the room except them and the world outside has decided that tonight is the night they’ll be given peace.

Dean jumps when Sam crawls into his bed like some kind of kicked dog, slides his cold hands up and under the front of Dean’s shirt and presses him back into his chest, the roughness of the cast on his bad arm scratching his skin. The zipper of Sam’s hoodie digs into his spine and Dean kicks his brother very hard in the shins. Tries to pry himself free but Sam’s got all that Stanford growth that Dean hasn't figured out yet.

Sam opens his mouth at the back of Dean’s neck and he goes pliant just like that, moulded to Sam’s chest, the hand his brother has spread wide over his chest now anything but cold.

“C’mon, man,” Dean complains, trying his very best to keep his voice from waving when he feels Sam’s teeth graze over the notch at the top of his spine. Sam’s breath fans hot over the back of Dean’s neck and he wants to curl up with Sam around him like a fleshy cocoon as much as he wants to desperately bolt.

He doesn’t know if this is Sam’s attempt to get him to talk or get him to stop thinking about today’s events, but neither endeavour is working as well as it normally does and their dad’s voice is in his head as if he’s here with them. Like when they were both half their size and there was still enough space in the one bed for the two of them. When Sam would press his foot solidly against Dean’s calf under the sheets, ten inches apart, back to back. The slightest taste of contact, innocent from their father’s perspective.

It’s like that, except instead instead of John telling them to sleep for the grueling tomorrow he’s standing in the corner and reminding Dean that it’s his fault Sam is all fucked up like this, and instead of a foot against the back of his leg it’s his brother’s hand scritch-scratching at the spot where his underwear sits against his lower belly.

This is the most familiar. Dean remembers this because he’s unwittingly burnt it behind his eyelids. Digital clock lit motel rooms and Sam’s hands on him, unravelling the day’s hunt from deep within Dean’s bones with just his mouth until he’s lax and physically unable to think of desolate things because Sam has taken his brain and all conscious thought with him too.

But he’s got that acidic aftertaste from inhaling medicinal fumes still stuck at the back of his throat and having Sam like this only makes the burn of it stronger. He spent too today trying to figure out if there was such a thing as life after Sam, a concept that he’s always dwelled on unhealthily. Except today Sam had sat opposite him stuffing rags into bottles while he very literally, slowly expired.

The ticking clock on the wall counted down the time they had left together and they had spoken a maximum of five words in the four hours because there was nothing to say that would magically cure it all so why even bother try. Dean had kept his face straight and tried to come to terms with the fact that that was all there was, that they were going to spend the last hours of their lives in silent angst before Sam would turn and slot the knife he kept tucked at his ankle between Dean’s ribs in a croatoan induced fever. Mix their blood and spend the next hours or days insane and bloodthirsty until someone put a bullet in their respective heads.

At least they’d be together. At least he wouldn’t be the one with the finger on the trigger. At least it would be Sam’s diseased blood in his veins; just about business as usual because sharing blood is what they’ve always done best.

Sam is too warm at his back, his palms sweaty where they’re splayed out over Dean’s collar, his fingers under the waistband of his briefs. It’s all too much all of a sudden. Sam very alive, blood and bones and skin and it hits Dean bodily.

“S--” he tries, but there’s no air to breathe. “Sam, stop.”

Sam’s hands retract instantly, like he’s been blistered, pushes himself away from Dean so fast that he slides completely off the bed and onto his ass with a thump.

“Sorry,” Sam says, so quiet, and the word almost breaks down the middle.

Dean rolls over and pushes himself up on his hands. His brother is hidden behind his too-long hair, his ridiculous limbs bunched up in the tiny space between the beds, jaw clenched in the way that Dean knows means he’s trying to keep tears from reaching his eyes, cradling his cumbersome cast against his chest. Guilt ridden and upset, it makes all of Dean’s big brother instincts flare, wants to bundle him up, rub at his back. _It’s okay, Sammy. You’re alright. We’re alright._

“I just--” Sam starts. “I thought…”

“No it’s,” Dean tries. “It’s not that.” Sam had thought correct, Sam was the smartest person Dean knew and the only one that had ever managed to work the intricacies of Dean out so thoroughly. It wasn’t because he didn’t want Sam like that, he’d long ago stopped lying to himself in that regard.

“C’mere,” Dean tries again, sits up and reaches both hands out to his brother. “You look pathetic.”

Sam glances up at him with those huge doe fuckin’ eyes that he definitely got from their mother, grabs onto Dean’s forearm in a lock-grip and pulls himself to his knees. Dean leans over and kisses him and Sam makes a startled sound at that, like he hadn’t seen it coming. Smartest, dumbest person, Dean corrects.

He hauls Sam onto the bed again, gets his brother under him. Dean unzips Sam’s hoodie, lets it fall open at his sides, pushes his hands up under his shirt and feels Sam’s muscles tense. Warm and alive and _human_ , god damn it.

Dean puts his mouth at Sam’s collar, speaks muffled into his skin because it’s easier that way. Sam’s hands come up to scratch at the nape of his neck, gentle pressure with his fingertips.

“Because of today?” Sam asks, smack dead on the money.

Dean makes a sound he hopes comes across as non-committal but he’s never really been good at hiding his bleeding heart.

Sam huffs loudly and Dean can feel the exhale under his mouth, under his hands. Sam’s fingers leave his neck, run down and slide under his shirt. He presses a hand firm and wide against Dean’s lower back, pressing their hips together familiarly. Sam rocks up, just a little and Dean opens his mouth at brother’s throat.

“I’m still here, Dean.”

He wants to tell him to shut up, that he doesn’t need to hear this shit because of course he’s here. His brother is very solid and present and hard slotted against him. Dean can feel every part of him, run his hands to check - his tongue even, taste him all - and Sam would very gladly let it happen.

“Not going anywhere,” Sam continues, brings Dean’s head up to meet his eyes - just to drive the point home. Sam’s got that look, that burning behind his iris’ and Dean holds his gaze while he rolls his hips forward purposefully, watches as Sam breaks their eye contact to push his head back into the pillow and Dean feels as though he’s won something. This has always been the easiest way to get him off his case.

He gets his brother to shut up because he’s lying. Sam’s lying and those kind of teenage promises Dean used to whisper to him when Sam was rattled in the worst kind of ways don’t carry the same weight anymore. Dean knows better, that this life will tear them apart and all they’re going to do is go down bloody. And Sam? Sam’s destined to go by Dean’s hand because their father’s words were scripture. Especially the ones intentionally picked minutes before Death collected.

Not today, not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow or next week but eventually, they will be the death of each other. Fate sealed the moment Sam clasped all of his baby fingers around Dean’s thumb, when Dean felt his breath leave his body, filled instead with such an unhealthy amount of love. Dean knew they were special. His brother, who looked back at him with the same colour eyes, and bled the same Winchester red.

Dean’s tired, he’s tired of their slow march to hell, to separation, and his mind won’t keep revisiting the idea of having Sam like this anywhere. Without the crushing responsibility of heroism, without grave-dirt under their nails and something else’s blood flecked up against their necks.

A road trip to the Grand Canyon, backseat full of pamphlets and the Impala’s keys heavier with the souvenir Sam bought him from the gas station, slid through the ring without Dean noticing. They’d stand on the ledge and throw rocks off and hear the smash of them three seconds after seeing it with their eyes.

Dean would stand and look out at all of that orange land and think about how insignificant they meant in the grand scheme of things. That they were two of seven billion and how much easier it would be to fall and die like that instead. By his own hand and not by some gurgling hellspawn. And Sam would follow, as he always does. Then there might be peace for them.

Or maybe feeling his brother come apart under his hands is a suicide pact enough. Because Dean isn’t suppose to have him like this, Sam’s hands taking him out of his jeans, easily with only one good hand because this is what they do, this is how they’ve always been and Dean’s about to be nudged off that cliff by Sam grabbing at him just like that and he’s going to fall and fall and fall and find that at the bottom of the chasm is only his brother, who has followed him over the edge and is left in the same state. Violent messes; they will put each other back together piece by piece. Peace by piece.

The cross above Dean’s bed has skewed sideways to match Sam’s and he wonders if the complimentary pocket sized bible left next to their factory wrapped motel soap and towel has any answers on what to do when you’re hearing your father’s last words on repeat while you’re fucking your younger brother.

“Dean,” Sam says, very softly while they’re catching their breath, Dean collapsed half on, half off Sam’s chest, his face squashed up in the juncture of Sam’s neck so he can still feel the beating of his heart.

“Dean,” Sam repeats when he doesn’t reply. “You know I’ll do anything. Whatever you want to do, wherever you want to go.”

“You and me,” Dean mumbles against Sam’s skin. A mantra.

“You and me.”

No harm in fantasy. Make-believe because Sam is going to find out what their father had warned Dean of inevitably and he thinks from then on it will be more, you.

Me.


End file.
